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An End to Boondoggling

I’ve been thinking. If we intend to introduce a job guarantee, we first need to address the grave issue of boondoggling. It’s time we got serious about eliminating this terrible social ill. I haven’t bothered to check, but I would imagine that boondoggles are occurring at an incredible rate all round the world, every second of the day, and this is before we’ve even introduced the job guarantee. It’s as if the very thought of such a program has set off an epidemic of boondoggling. It’s time to compile a list of worthless activities that add zero value – sometimes negative value – to my real living standard. This list is neither definitive nor exhaustive. Market signals and the threat of starvation were too weak to induce that kind of effort. But at least it will enable us all to point the finger at those who are contributing absolutely nothing to the aggregate of my personal well being.

List of Boondogglers

1. Anyone in banking, trading or finance. I’ve been thinking about it. Not one of the things I eat, drink, drive, ride, think or enjoy is due to these people. Okay, other than Gordon Gekko. He was intriguing.

2. The military. All they do is kill people.

3. The secret service. What’s with all the secrets?

4. Journalists. If I wanted propaganda, I’d move to North Korea!

5. Advertisers, sales people. Ditto.

6. Publishers and Record Labels. They never published my books or released my records!

7. Politicians.

8. Neoclassical economists. Except for the game theorists. It sounds like they do serious work!

9. Austrians. Unless it is their nationality.

10. Sports players. Footballers excepted.

11. Any tradesperson working on someone else’s place; any writer of a book I won’t read; any singer of a song I won’t hear; any abstract painter whose work I find disorienting; any poet or philosopher I’m too dense to understand.

12. Anyone beautifying a city I will never visit or see on TV.

13. Doctors on healthy days; dentists doing teeth whitening.

14. Security guards on day duty; jail wardens on night duty.

15. Hairdressers in the 70s; entrepreneurs in the 80s.

16. Poor conversationalists.

17. The film industry.

18. Stand up comedians having off nights.

19. Hecklers.

20. The furtive, the nervous, the restless.

21. People sleeping.

22. Suppliers of home gardening products. (I live in the city. We have a park.)

23. Miners. Unless they at least go to the trouble of digging holes and filling them back up again.

Btw, I rank banks in the socially productive category. Banking is a very weird version of seriously over-paid (and that is why we normally tend to have inflation) version of JG. Banking in its current form is the only tool that exist out there to prop up employment.